By Carin M. Smilk, JNS Everyone has heard of the unlikely hero—that person who, despite all odds, comes to the rescue. And then there’s the likely hero — that person trained to do the right thing as a result of career and happenstance. In the movies, such roles are often

Review by PJ Grisar, Forward Art Spiegelman’s life was always doomed to be one that wrestled with a larger legacy — or a 500-pound mouse. In his book Breakdowns, about his artist’s journey, he illustrated his Holocaust survivor father, Wladek, giving him a Yiddish-syntaxed lesson in packing. “Use what little

Review by Simi Horwitz, Forward Early in Nir Bergman’s Pink Lady, Bati (Nur Fibak), a married Haredi woman and the mother of three children, is riding a city bus when she becomes aware of a dark-skinned man, perhaps an Arab, eyeing her. She is at once attracted, intrigued, and profoundly

By Andrew Guckes, Baltimore Jewish Times Abby Ginzberg has made a lot of films. None, however, was as important or as personal to her as Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold. Ginzberg, as it turns out, is a distant relative of Szold and the granddaughter of

By Jon Kalish, NY Jewish Week “When a lady whistled at you on Allen Street, you knew she’s not calling you to a minyan!” So goes a particularly illuminating quote from a lawyer named Jonah Goldstein, describing just how derelict life on the Lower East Side was in July 1913,

Israeli journalist Lee Yaron spent months interviewing survivors and eyewitnesses. By Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTA Lee Yaron was in New York on Oct. 7, 2023 doing a fellowship at Columbia University, when news broke of an unimaginable attack on southern Israel by Hamas. Like many Israelis living abroad, she felt helpless

Gursha is both a memoir and recipe collection from the proprietor of Tsion Cafe. By Rachel Ringler, New York Jewish Week Chef Beejhy Barhany, the proprietor of Tsion Cafe, a kosher and vegan Israeli Ethiopian restaurant in Harlem, was born in Ethiopia. As a child, she spent three years in

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer One striking aspect of the World War II Gallery at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Fairborn is how Nazi artifacts are on display in ways that intentionally don’t glorify them. A gilt bronze Nazi eagle from the entrance to

By Andy Baskin, Cleveland Jewish News If there is one clear message in college football, Ohio State shows no signs of letting anybody knock them off the top of the mountain. The Buckeyes remain the No. 1 team in the country after knocking off Wisconsin. They play Penn State at

Author opens 2025-26 JCC Cultural Arts & Book Series Reviewed by Bernie Bellan, Jewish Post & News (Winnipeg) With over 75 million record albums sold and 118 songs that she either wrote or cowrote, Carole King’s prolific, fabulously successful career has been the subject of several books and numerous articles,